by Allen Kent
“And your brothers? Other than work?”
“You must talk to them directly about the rest of their time. We all went to the church meeting. We are very grateful to this church. In the evenings, all the families come together after we eat. But we do not all sleep in the same house, so who can say for sure? But I know my brothers would not harm the man without my knowing.”
I glanced over at Grace. “Any other questions from you, Officer Torres?”
“Yes. A couple. Was this Mr. Sayegh relocated at the same time you were, Mr. Haddad?”
Yusef grimaced and shook his head. “He was one of Assad’s people. He would not have been taken in by the United States.”
“So you are assuming he was not in this country legally.”
“I am quite certain he was not.”
“Do you believe he was here looking for you?”
Yusef raised his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “Who can know such a thing? But he was here. This is not a town a man just drives through when he is touring in America for a few weeks. We are his enemies. What other conclusion can we make?”
Grace gave me another head nod to signal she had asked all her questions.
“I think that will be all for now, Mr. Haddad. Please excuse our intrusion on your family this evening. But please also ask your brothers if they know anything that might be helpful. Give me a call if they have information. I will probably be getting in touch with each of them, so tell them to expect a visit and stay in town.” We all stood, and Yusef escorted us to the door.
“I shall speak to them. And I will surely call you if we have anything to say,” he promised. He remained on the doorstep as we walked to the car, following us with a grim frown.
As we reached the car, my cell buzzed. It was Joseph.
“Are you where you can talk?” she asked when I answered.
“Yes. We’re just leaving the home of one of our Syrian families.”
“Can you meet me at the office? I have some interesting information about the bombing here and thought you might want to drive up to Springfield with me.”
“Oh? What’s up?”
Grace was watching me closely.
“When you said you thought the body you found was Syrian, we mailed the morgue photo to Washington,” Joseph said. “They’re flying someone out. I’m headed to the airport to pick up a guy from the FBI’s counterterrorism division. I thought you might want to be there to meet him with me.”
8
“What was that all about?” Grace asked as we left the Haddad home. “I thought we were taking the murder case, and State was checking out the explosion at the dam.”
“It looks like the Feds are coming in. And I got the impression Officer Joseph thinks the two might be related.”
Grace sniffed under her breath but said nothing. I decided it might be wisest to leave Joseph out of the conversation for now and let her fill us in when we reached the office. “What did you make of what Yusef had to say?” I asked.
“It’s got to be a lot more than coincidence that this guy shows up here and was a known enemy of the family in Syria. Mrs. Haddad—Lilia, or whatever her name is—seemed really terrified. The father? I’m not so sure. I can’t say that I like the man. He’s too much like some others I know. But they must have put those families here because they suspected someone might come looking for them and felt like they’d be hard to find here. The FBI sending someone in from Washington would support that.”
“Sounds right to me,” I agreed. “And I don’t like what it suggests. If Washington didn’t know the guy was in the country until the state patrol sent the photo, that makes me think someone here killed him. Someone who knew about the water project and figured if they buried him in the dam, he’d never be found.”
“Wouldn’t that mean that whoever blew up the dam wasn’t connected in some way to the murder?” Grace objected. “The killer would want the body to stay covered up.”
“Unless that someone wanted the body found to implicate our Syrians. They’d know that sooner or later we’d tie the victim back to the Haddads.”
Grace shook her head. “So someone knew the Haddads had killed the guy and buried him in the dam, then blew him back out? Not likely, I think.” She paused, then added, “Unless this Farid wasn’t here by himself.”
My turn to shake off her suggestion. “If there was someone else, I think they’d just go after the families again. Why go to all the trouble to blow the dam up and make us piece all this together?”
“To let us take care of the Haddads for them,” she suggested.
I wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think that’s the kind of revenge they’d be after. They’d want blood.”
“This revenge thing,” Grace wondered. “It’s really that deeply imbedded in the culture?”
“It is. Sort of like the old Hatfields and McCoys. You kill one of ours. We have of kill one of yours.”
“If this guy had gotten to one of the Haddads, would the families here feel like they needed to go back and revenge the killing?”
I chuckled cynically. “You saw Yusef. I guess it depends on how much of an American father he’s become.”
“Was he telling us the truth about the family not knowing Sayegh was here?”
“You never can be sure. You might have noticed he was quite careful not to say that he didn’t know Farid was here. He just said the family didn’t know. But if I had to bet on it, I’d say he was telling the truth. And I don’t think the brothers would kill the man without letting him know.”
We rode in silence until back on the square. I parked in front of the building we jokingly call the Blockhouse because of the solid old limestone construction and a single window looking out from what had once been the lobby. No other natural light. Joseph’s car wasn’t in one of the reserved spots.
“What do you think about the visit to the Webber sisters?” Grace wondered, wanting to talk this through before Joseph was part of the discussion.
I raised my hands in surrender. “I’ve quit trying to figure those two ladies out. They’ve been reading tea leaves since I was a kid. My mother used to swear by them, and half the people in town still go out there sometimes. I think even Reverend Latimer’s wife gets readings every now and then. Jerry takes groceries up to them every week. A couple of years ago, they told him he should call me before he left to come back into town—to let me know he was going to be in an accident and would need some help. He didn’t call because he didn’t believe the old ladies. A deer ran in front of him and he swerved off the road into a tree. Knocked him out cold. Lucky for him, someone else came by and saw the car.”
“So, you believe in them?”
“Let’s just say I can’t explain them.”
“Will it do any good to go talk to them?”
I looked over with a grin and pushed open the car door as Officer Joseph pulled up beside us. “I was just going to suggest that you run out there tomorrow. Let’s see what Joseph has to say. Then maybe you can fill in the gaps with a reading.”
Mara Joseph held out a three-inch length of black insulated wire with a small clip on one end. “Recognize this?” she asked.
I did. “Looks like the detonation cord from an M183.”
“Very good. And there’s C4 residue all over that site out there. Someone blew up the dam using a military demolition kit, placed about in the center of the concrete culvert that’s handling the water from the stream while the dam’s being constructed. The blast throwing up a slab of concrete was probably what kept the body above it from being blown to pieces.”
“Someone obviously knew what they were doing.”
“Or didn’t know there was a body there, and it just happened that way. Do your Syrians have military experience?”
“They were resistance fighters,” I told her. “But I don’t know what that means in terms of formal military training. Especially with explosives. We did learn that they knew the man. And that there was some kind of bad blood
between the families. I think it’s pretty likely he was here on some kind of vendetta mission.”
“All the more reason to suspect them of both,” Joseph said. “They are the only ones who would have recognized the man, and they knew about the dam construction.”
I shook my head. “You don’t just run over to Home Depot and buy an M183 kit. I don’t know where they’d get anything like that, and neither would they. And as Grace said as we were driving back, why would they kill someone, bury the body, and then blow it back out of the ground?”
“I have a theory about that,” Joseph said. Grace raised a cynical brow and rolled her eyes. Joseph missed the display.
“After they planted the body, they decided they needed to send a message back to whoever sent this guy. Let them know he hadn’t succeeded in getting the job done.”
“No, no,” I muttered dismissively. “Two problems with that. Maybe three. First, that’s a pretty extreme way to expose the body again. Why not just go back out there, dig him up, and leave him in the woods somewhere? Plus, why draw all that extra attention to an investigation? We’re now not only investigating a murder, but checking to see who was able to get a military demolition pack and blow up a public works project. Double exposure.”
Joseph wagged her head, thinking that over. “Okay. That’s two reasons. What’s the third?”
“If this guy was coming after them, I’m not sure they would want to get word back to whoever sent him that he’d failed. I’d think that might add to the vendetta. They’d be better off to just let him disappear.”
Grace jumped into the conversation from the chair in the corner, which she’d managed this time to commandeer before Joseph could get seated. “We seem to be making a lot of assumptions here. First of all, aside from knowing these Syrians knew each other and had some bad war history, nothing else ties the Syrians to the murder. When we met with them, I think they were genuinely surprised to learn about the guy being here. And nothing really ties the explosion to the body. We know a bunch of people are upset about that dam, and the Greaves are as likely to be able to get C4 as anyone around here. They’re linked to all those white nationalist groups. And they have a lot more reason to want the dam gone than the Haddad families. I think we need to slow down and start doing some basic police work.”
She was right, of course. Joseph’s dark look showed she knew it too and didn’t like being lectured on basic police work. But the FBI wasn’t sending a counterterrorism guy out here for the hell of it. And what were the odds of two enemies from a small city in northwest Syria showing up in an even smaller town in the Missouri Ozarks by accident? Slim to none. The Haddads had to be involved somehow.
“Let’s go see what our man from Washington can tell us,” I suggested, pushing out of my chair. “And Grace, when you go see the Webber sisters in the morning, have them look at the leaves and see if they can tell us who killed Farid Sayegh.”
9
Joseph drove her state Tahoe, believing for some reason that it would be more appropriate for a state investigator rather than a county sheriff to meet the guy from Washington. I disagreed, as much because of my general distaste for the hierarchies that exist in law enforcement as for my feeling that this was my case. He should have to be dealing with me. But it was one of those issues that didn’t merit getting my britches in a knot, so I chose not to argue the point. Plus, it gave me a chance to guide the conversation from the passenger seat.
“Did you ever manage to get back to Mazatlán?” I asked after we cleared town and seemed on neutral ground. We had spent two days in the Mexican city on the Nettie Suskey murder case, tracking down a dealer in Civil War era American gold coins. The time together had kindled a spark I thought might turn into a relationship. But Joseph had decided she didn’t want to get that close, still smarting from having let that happen with an earlier partner, with bad results. But by the time the case ended, she was hinting that she would enjoy spending a week getting to know the Mexican city better and might enjoy company. I had spoken to her three times since, all within a month of wrapping up the case. But no invitation to return to Mazatlán.
She looked over, smiling thinly. “No. Didn’t ever go back. Thought about it a few times, but either didn’t want to take the time off, or wasn’t sure I wanted to risk getting back together.”
“Is that the same reason all my dinner invitations needed a rain check?”
“I think you only called three times.”
“Yup. Only three. It would have been a lot simpler if you’d just said, ‘Enough already! I don’t want us to get back together.’”
“I wasn’t sure I didn’t. I just couldn’t get myself to recommit. Plus, I could see how badly Grace wanted to be in that role in your life. And you weren’t entirely disinterested in her.”
“I told you before that Grace has a serious boyfriend. And we work too closely together to get involved. You know the problems that can cause.”
Her smile turned cynical. “And you don’t see this as working too closely?”
“This is what? A case every six or eight months that might bring you down our way? Once a year? That’s hardly bedfellows.”
She nodded grimly. “I know you’re right. And I have to admit, I felt a real surge when the division commander called to tell me you needed some state assistance again. I’d been wanting an excuse to see you, Tate. I just didn’t want to initiate it.”
“Well, here we are. Do you think we might be able to work dinner into some evening this week?”
“Let’s see where this goes with the FBI man. Our evenings might be pretty full.”
I can be slow. I mean, the second dinner turn-down should have been enough. But this time, I knew a “back off” when it came my way. I changed the subject. “So, what are you expecting from this guy? Did the Bureau say any more than that he was coming?”
She relaxed a little. “Nothing but that he’s from counter-terrorism. I take that to mean they recognized our man and he’s on one of their lists.”
“Did you have time before you came down to run his name through the databases you have access to?”
“I did. Came up empty. The Bureau sends us lists of people they have a special interest in. He wasn’t on any of them. What did your families tell you?”
“They were on different sides of the Syrian civil war. Idlib has been at the center of final efforts by the Assad government to crush the rebels. Our dead man supported Assad, and the Haddads the rebel group. There was some killing that involved the families. That’s about all I could get from them.”
“Not much justification for sending someone halfway around the world to seek revenge.”
I chuckled. “One of the first lessons I learned when I was deployed to Iraq was that nothing is ever as simple as it seems in that part of the world.”
“Or in this part,” she offered.
I don’t remember ever having met an FBI agent in person. I’d worked with DOD intelligence officers in Iraq. And some people I suspected were CIA. But never an FBI agent. Special Agent Warren Rosario didn’t disappoint. He was taller than average, maybe 6’ 1” or 6’ 2”, with a military haircut, intense hazel eyes, and the requisite dark suit and tie. I had started to have TV images of the FBI in jeans and blue vests with “FBI” emblazoned in bold letters across the back. It was good to see that the old Hoover influence hadn’t entirely ben erased.
We shook hands all around, and I dutifully grabbed his roller bag.
“Anyone from your local office meeting you?” Joseph asked.
Rosario grinned. “They don’t have any idea I’m here. Counterterrorism is something of its own master, and we don’t always bring the local office in. We’d just as soon this situation be below the radar for now. When local agents get involved, so does the press.”
“The dam explosion’s made the papers,” she told him. “But so far, we’ve been able to keep discovery of the body quiet.”
“The construction people aren’t talking?�
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“They don’t like the idea of a body being hidden in their dam any more than we do. And the night watchman’s hanging onto his job on the condition he keeps his mouth shut. So far, no leaks.”
Rosario seemed to want to talk about other things. “I think there must be a Springfield in every state,” he joked as we walked to the Enterprise rental counter. “I almost boarded a plane to Illinois.”
“It’s happened,” Joseph granted. “Have you reserved a place to stay?”
The special agent gave me a sidelong grin. “I looked for places near your little town, Sheriff, and only came up with a Super 8. So I’m booked into the Holiday Inn Express down on Highway 60. It looked like a good jumping-off spot to head toward Crayton. I’m a pretty avid fisherman and was thinking while I was here, I might as well stop by the Bass Pro mothership. And I hear their aquarium and wildlife museum are first class. All work and no play, as they say.”
Somehow that all seemed a little less Hoover but gave Agent Rosario a bit more humanity than I’d initially granted the man. We waited until he had his rental, then led him south to the hotel and got him checked in. He came back into the lobby dressed more like the TV agents: jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, but no blue vest. The breakfast area was empty. We found a corner table and caught him up on what we knew.
He nodded and laid the morgue shot of Farid Sayegh on the table. “I have to admit, this photo took us by surprise. We had no idea this guy was in the country. In fact, he’d been seen around Idlib as recently as two weeks ago.”
I didn’t try to hide my surprise. “You had someone watching him there?”
“Not us. And not him specifically. But military intelligence and the CIA are watching general activity in the area twenty-four seven. They keep an eye on all the major players. I looked into your background, Sheriff Tate. Decorated Marine. Squad interpreter in Iraq and Afghanistan. Language Services with the State Department after your discharge. Not exactly who I expected to find out here. But perfect for this case. What do you know about this area of Syria?”
